There's a Shark in My Hockey Pool

by Dave Belisle

  "Let's go, boys," Zipper said. "His boots have enough blood in'em."

  Helen gritted her teeth. She couldn't do anything now. The trainer had jurisdiction.

  "I'll wait for you," she said to Derek. She reached forward and touched his face. The brief caress brought back warm memories of his last stay in sick bay with her. Every injury carried with it a badge of honor. And it was women like Helen who made wearing them so much easier.

  The players whisked him away, down the tunnel, past the dressing room to the headquarters of the "Zipper".

  ... 4 ...

  Sitting on the training table, Marcotte played the game out in his head. He waited for the tap on the shoulder that would send him over the boards -- a tap that would never come. Derek looked around Zipper's room. Maybe they'd made a wrong turn. There was nothing antiseptic about this place. The yellowing porcelain sink was only a shade or two behind its urinal brother down the hall. The two-foot-high mirror, a crystallized speckle of its former self, had been hung by a maintenance man who assumed most people entering the rink were five-foot-four.

  A scale stood off to the side beside a small wooden table. A box of ace bandages supported one of the table's legs. The drawer in the table was minus one handle. A haphazard assortment of opened boxes of gauze, plastic and glass containers was strewn atop the table. This was the surgical side of garage sales.

  Zorenson looked over the x-rays of Derek's damaged foot. The images were hot off the press from Guelph General's x-ray lab next door. Zorenson would never be accused of having a good poker face. A pair of anything would be better than the hand Zipper was about to deal Marcotte.

  "How bad is it, Zip?"

  Zorenson pointed to the x-ray. Derek smirked. Why did doctors always assume a patient could read an x-ray? When people showed pictures of their summer vacation, did they pass around the negatives?

  "Your leg's gonna need all the steel from an erector set. But you'll be a popular guy at airport metal detectors."

  Zipper had long since found laughter the best medicine when it came to telling a patient how bad the injury was. But he always tempered the situation by playing it straight up. He wasn't about to keep the patient in the dark like some doctors, who armed the wounded with only a thin veil of hope that never completely masked the wracking nerves of anxiety.

  Derek slipped into his own inner hell. The capacity faithful would mourn his absence before turning their attention to the next three-on-two break-out ... but Zipper was hiding something. All too soon the trainer would paint the big picture in slashing strokes. The muffled sounds of the game seeped through the concrete walls. Derek's mental anguish gained on the pain, still a searing fire down below. He'd fallen from this amusement park ride. Until that moment it had been such a wonderful trip. He could taste the NHL (Nathanael Hockey League). A pox on the Zipper's next sentence.

  "Sorry, son. Your hockey playing days are over."

  Awaking With the Enemy

  ... 1 ...

  The hard, dark waters of Lake Ontario lapped up against Toronto's bustling harbour front. February's chill froze the exhaust of Lake Shore Boulevard's rush hour traffic as it poured past Union Station and the Convention Centre. The jack sprat CN Tower and fat lady SkyDome monitored the exiting masses.

  Guelph was forty miles and eight years away from the narrow three-story brownstone at 212 Sheppard Street. Derek's marketing firm, May-Ja-Look, was stuffed away in an office on the third floor of the building, whose tenants claim offered the best views of Temperance. Only two blocks long, Temperance Street was one of Hogtown's many short, intersecting thoroughfares. Its west end abutted 212 Sheppard. May-Ja-Look was making barely enough money to keep the water cooler running, let alone keep a bottle of Pack o' Spaniels Tennessee whiskey in the filing cabinet.

  Following the accident -- in between Helen's constant pillow fluffing and chicken-noodle-soup-stuffing bedside manner -- Derek's life hit a speed bump that didn't appear that big at first. After scratching the NHL from his short list of career options, he looked at what remained. Nothing. The career placement radio ad had the smarmy voice promising, "I like working with people." If he ever used that line in a job interview he promised he'd shoot himself. It was around this time that Artie Hammond paid him a visit.

  They'd taken a couple of business classes together at Guelph. Artie was the guy who always did the bonus questions on homework but never raised his hand in class to prove it. It was this inner drive of Artie's, fed page by page, that Derek saw and admired. Artie's penchant for spread sheets and bottom lines meant the object he fondled most frequently was a computer keyboard. He was more familiar with software and hardware than what was happening in his own underwear. So when Artie propositioned Derek about starting up a marketing business in Toronto, Derek's career option list blinked back on line.

  Marcotte was a diehard Maple Leafs fan. On Darryl Sittler's 10-point night, he could provide the time of each goal. Unfortunately, May-Ja-Look's fortunes had run much the same as the hockey team's play-off success. Business had trickled through the door for most of the past eight years at a bare-sustenance pace.

  Derek sat at his desk, panning the pages of the Hockey Bible. His office was small with one window. A defenbachia guarded one corner. A framed Leroy Niemann-like hockey print hung from one wall. Other pictures included autographed glossies of Sittler and Dave Keon. For Torontonians, the two faces linked two diametrically opposed decades. The clean-cut Keon's Spartan determination of the '60s surrealized into Sittler's curly locks and the disco-or-be-damned '70s. A shin-barking coffee table stood between two fake-lizard leather lounge chairs. A stack of trade magazines and news periodicals sat on one corner of Derek's desk. On the other corner sat a mounted, plastic-encased hockey card of a young Terry Sawchuk. Sawchuk's career added the 40's and 50's to the list of hockey heritage the room housed. Several folders lay strewn about on the desktop in front of Derek.

  There was a knock on the pane of the open door and Artie poked his head into the office.

  "Derek?"

  Marcotte stayed immersed in a rumor about the Leafs trading defenseman Dave Ellett and right winger Rob Pearson to Calgary for the blue line blaster, Al MacInnis. The Toronto sportswriting grapevine flourished year round, albeit yielding a stock that was 90% sour.

  "Yeah?"

  "I've got good news ... and bad news."

  Derek wearily closed the paper.

  "Let's have the bad news," he said.

  "The Rankin campaign? We didn't get it. They liked Herculean's concept better. Said something about the waves crashing against the shore giving them the imagery they wanted."

  Derek slammed his fist against the desk. Sawchuk bounced, his grin quickly turning to a chuckle.

  "Waves? Imagery? They're a goddamn hardware store! We're up against God. That bastard, Erskine, can even give a crescent wrench feelings!"

  Marcotte grabbed the Hockey Bible and slowly wrung it into a cylinder with both hands. It was an eerie equation of emotional physics. As the diameter of the cylinder grew smaller, Derek's anger increased.

  Erskine. Everywhere he looked. Victor's father had bankrolled his business. The old man didn't have the clout to have his son skating in the NHL, but he'd turned Marcotte's second career choice into a steeple chase. It seemed with each Herculean obstacle Derek's and Artie's hands -- and feet -- were tied. Every major advertising campaign that came over the wire was snapped up by Erskine's outfit. The small jobs that May-Ja-Look landed were bones deemed too small for the big hound. May-Ja-Look was not turning heads with table scraps.

  Realizing his constricted breathing and the white-knuckled grip he had on the rolled-up Hockey Bible were related, Derek relaxed and slowly unfurled the sports tabloid. He spread it out on the desktop. Reaching over to the stack of magazines, he snatched one off the top, quickly rolled it up and winged it across the room. The pages of Adverse Advertising flapped with a crisp ripple before their free flight crashed against the far wall. Artie shuffled nervously
from one leg to the other in the doorway, hoping this was only a one-trade-mag tirade.

  "I'll move onto the good news?"

  "It's gotta be great at this point."

  "Cooper is letting our rent slide this month."

  "Hallelujah," Derek said. "Uh-oh. That means I'd better take him to the Leafs game Wednesday."

  Season tickets to the Leafs was a bargaining chip that came in handy when wooing prospective clients. The past few years however, they had been more effective keeping the wolf, building manager, Nelson Cooper, from the door.

  "Don't mind, do ya?"

  "Go, Leafs, go," Artie said with a shrug of the shoulders.

  Artie returned to his desk in the outer office area. Derek eased back in his chair with a worried look. He gazed at the Niemann-like print. A nondescript Montreal Canadien was hooking a similarly nameless Maple Leaf from behind. The artist had captured the fire-wagon flare with each brush stroke of the Canadien player garbed in the Club de Hockey bleu, blanc et rouge. Meanwhile, the Maple Leaf's pristine white with navy blue trim home sweater was the rest of the country's flag, caught in a gale and sure to blow away from the not-quite flying frenchman at any second. The colors splashed into each other. The figures were recognizable ... yet strangely foreign.

  Here he was, a hockey player, in advertising. Players hope their careers have been eye-catching enough to garner lucrative marketing endorsements. Marcotte found himself at the other end of the spectrum. With little or no name recognition, he couldn't go straight to the marquee. Instead, he had to hang out his shingle like every other advertising schlep.

  At least he had Artie. Thank God for that. Artie had seen the cracks, but had decided to ride out the storm with Derek. A big black Vancouver rain cloud continued hanging over their office.

  Derek returned home each night ... to Helen. Quiet, unassuming ... she'd gone beneath the surface repair, behind the drywall, and nursed him back to health with her plastering care. Helen's bedside manner had quickly enveloped the other rooms of the house. He reminded himself almost daily she was a blessing in disguise. But what exactly was she when the mask came off? When convenience begged compassion? After eight years, her mind still had many unprobed lobes for him. Marriage, children, RRSP's ... these were all conversational items that the magic of common law simply swept under the carpet.

  Their relationship was rife with renovations. Your basic fixer-upper. She got him to where he was going, safe and sound, watered and fed. For good or bad, he was stuck with the stucco queen.

  The psychological ramifications hit home harder every day. At work and at home, Derek Marcotte at 32, was restoring his own Sistine Chapel while standing on his head. All the more laborious ... when working with chapstick.

  ... 2 ...

  A pair of boys wristed a sponge rubber hockey puck back and forth along the quiet street in front of the fifteen-story, post-war building. One boy aimed for the parked two-door Shove-Pet beside the other boy, some fifty yards distant. The other boy returned fire upon a Pontiaque LeMensa to the right of the first boy. In this game of "park the puck", the first one to hit their target three times would win. Adults peeking out of windows never watched the game long enough to realize their vehicles were under siege.

  Inside apartment #714, the Leafs fluttered across the TV screen. The room's homey decor was modest, contemporary and embossed with a woman's touch. A model spitfire waited for clearance to take-off from atop a bookcase. The bookcase contained several history books that were outnumbered by text after text of medical information. A pompous bust of Winston Churchill made for an indignant bookend. Derek leaned forward in the Lazy-boy, wolfing down his meal. Helen entered the room with a glass of milk and placed it on the coffee table in front of him. Her actions were mechanical. Like clockwork, she still blocked his view of the TV during instant replays.

  "Thanks."

  "Can I get you anything else?"

  "How 'bout a coupla goals for the Leafs?"

  Helen paused to watch the action. She'd lived with Derek for nearly a decade and was still never sure when he was being serious or sarcastic. She treaded water in these situations, waiting for some life-saving cord of reality to be thrown her way. There was none coming. Derek spoke a different tongue when a hockey game was on. His dialogue was fired out in short, staccato syllables ... so as not to step on the announcer's play-by-play.

  The problem was that she was never sure which team Toronto was. Sometimes they wore blue, sometimes white. But the other team often wore white as well.

  "What's the score?" she asked finally.

  "4-2, Hartford."

  Her brow furrowed at this trivial revelation.

  "Hartford has a team?"

  "Yeah, the Whalers. They're named after a bunch of anti-Greenpeacers."

  Derek didn't see Helen frown. He was engrossed in a fight that had broken out. The Leaf and Whaler exchanged haymakers as they twirled in circles. Half of the blows glanced off helmets while the others missed wildly. The fans' cheering turned to boos, signalling the fight was over. The linesmen ushered the two combatants to the penalty box. With one arm clutching their respective assailants, the officials used the other to slick back their mussed hair. They tucked their zebra sweaters neatly back into place. Their eyes danced with worry.

  "Those poor animals," Helen said.

  "What? The whales or the two guys duking it out?"

  "Both."

  She sat down on the sofa and pulled a Thimble-Ware magazine from the nearby rack. Derek watched her carefully. She had a way of capsulizing a situation, while standing aloof with little or no interest. Helen wasn't a true hockey fan like the hard-boiled, hot stove league cookie. The sport was entertainment caught in bed with business, with everybody wondering what the next week, month or year would bring. To her it would always be just a game. But she tried. She made the effort, and it was times like these, he admired her. When was the last time he'd taken her out? He thought hard.

  She returned his gaze. Caught spying, he grinned sheepishly.

  "What?" she asked, knowing full well.

  His smile echoed hers and he quickly turned his attention back to the game, before he started something he couldn't finish. He wanted to watch the rest of the game.

  ... 3 ...

  Artie sat at his desk, going through the mail. Derek stood nearby in front of a filing cabinet, looking through a folder.

  "Hey. Lookee here," Artie said.

  "Whatcha got?"

  "An R.F.P. from Quick Pucks."

  "No shit."

  Quick Pucks was the legalized gambling venture set up by the federal government for Ontario hockey fans. Derek closed the folder and tossed it on top of the filing cabinet. It joined a heap of several others. He came closer and looked over Artie's shoulder.

  "Those guys have the best scam in town. Where else can you sit on the edge of your seat for only a buck?"

  "The deadline for presentations is next week," Artie said. He poured over the information quickly, checking both sides of the paper, looking for helpful hints the client sometimes left hidden between the lines.

  Derek turned and walked slowly away from the desk, his right hand massaging his chin.

  "Y'know Artie. I've been thinking that maybe May-Ja-Look has been going about this the wrong way."

  "Oh?"

  Artie was standing still but his brain was back-pedaling like crazy. Whenever Derek started talking about the company in the third person, there were usually grandiose visions afoot.

  Marcotte began the return trip on his pacing oval. He pounded his fist into his palm.

  "Shit, yeah. Eight years and this company is still scraping by. I think it's time for a change."

  "Uh ... what kind of change did you have in mind?"

  "Personnel, of course."

  "But I thought ... what we had ... was good enough." Artie spoke haltingly. He double-checked his desk to make sure it was clean. But it always was. Folders were stacked neatly to one side. All pens and pe
ncils were accounted for in a Leafs mug, ink and lead down. No paper clips had escaped their magnetic holder. He reached across the desk to align the stapler with the edge of the computer.

  Derek gripped the edge of Artie's desk with both hands and leaned forward into Artie's face. Artie looked at Derek's hands. The knuckles were whitening and Artie suddenly pictured Derek's hands wrapped around his neck instead of the hard oak.

  "What we had ... we still have ... and it's not getting the job done."

  "But ... but ..." Artie stammered, searching for a straw, any straw to grasp. But he was back-pedaling without a rear view mirror.

  "It's always been the two of us. You, me .. and May-Ja-Look. Well, not any more."

  Artie stood up to escape the interrogating stare of Derek. Now he was out of pit row and into the pacing oval ... with serious engine problems. He felt like he'd been kicked in the balls. One lap and the yellow flag was already out in the Magnesia Malt 500.

  "Gee, I always thought I was pulling my weight. I never said I was a marketing maven. I ... I've been meaning to learn another software package."

  "Mass produced ideas are not going to get us off the beaten track," Derek said. We've got to make a clean break. A fresh start, a new beginning. Let's not be generic. Let's think genesis."

  Artie pulled off to the side of the office. He was a wreck. You think you know somebody for nine years ... and they toss you aside like a hubcap after a blowout.

  "I wish we could have talked about this."

  "We are." Derek waited with his hands on his hips.

  "Well ... you sound like you've already made up your mind." Artie almost snapped the words at Derek. He looked around desperately. Where was that tow truck?